Check out Adam Howard’s great piece on the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise over at Playboy It’s a great examination of the contradictory appeal of this very contradictory franchise—featuring some commentary from yours truly: I do think it’s an interesting franchise because it’s premised on this whole idea of the forbidden,” Reina Gattuso, a columnist for Feministing who writes about gender,…

Check out the original piece at Feministing. The more we realize that sexual violence is not a series of isolated, one-off occurrences, separate blips on the radar screen, the more we have to contend with the violence of the everyday. Isolated, spectacular violence warrants isolated, spectacular justice. But how do we imagine justice, and healing, and survival,…

Check out the original article at Feministing. You’ve been stuffed into a box your whole life. You contort yourself to fit. Twist your legs. Chop off your arms. Breathe shallower. Then one day you realize—we realize, together—the box has seams in it. After lifetimes of contortion, we realize: Explode the box. It’s easier said than done, but…

Read the original article at Feministing. “We are taught how to fall in love, but we are never taught how to deal with love ending.” A young man said this recently during a community discussion on sexual harassment and violence. It struck a chord in me. Intimate partner violence, after all, tends to escalate when the victim is…

With the #MeToo movement dominating the headlines over the past few months, many of us have had to ask tough questions about our own experiences of gender, power, and relationships. While women have taken the forefront of the movement, it’s also been a moment of reckoning for men. The movement has not only provided an…

We know that women face a number of challenges to achieving equality. In the boardroom, we face the wage gap. And in the bedroom: The orgasm gap. Researchers (and everyday people!) have found that a gap exists between the frequency with which men and women experience orgasm, especially during heterosexual sex. Specifically, women consistently have fewer…

The summer I was nineteen, I researched and wrote a travel guide to Italy, journeying from Venice to the Cinque Terre armed only with a sundress and my handy dandy Macbook. It sounds pretty ideal, and it was—except for the constant, terrifying, enraging sexual harassment. From being groped on the train to being kissed non-consensually…

Read the full article at Talkspace. For most of us, orgasms are, simply, awesome. Yet from the origins of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century, a combination of cultural stereotypes, pseudoscience, and plain old misogyny created an enduring notion that women’s orgasms were a problem to be solved, rather than a normal part of sexual…

Find the original article at Talkspace. I’m not so hot on monogamy. It’s always been strange to me that society decides one way of doing romantic relationships: boy meets girl; boy and girl date; boy and girl marry; boy and girl never date or sleep with anyone else ever again. If we’re all unique, why…

Find the original article on Talkspace. During the Civil Rights Movement, white psychologists invented a so-called mental illness. Dubbing it “protest psychosis,” these psychologists used the racially-motivated “syndrome” to explain away the reasonable rage of black Americans demanding an end to segregation. Sixty years later, racial disparities in the mental health care system remain, including lack of…

You can read the original piece at Feministing I was horny in high school. Like many adolescent humans, sex ricocheted through my body like a summer storm. If you’ve read any of my writing, however, you will not be even remotely surprised to know that my outspoken feminism and ability to scan Shakespearean meter did…

The website that’s hosted my column for the past couple years, Feministing, is currently on the fundraising hustle! Passionate about great feminist writing? Become a member today. Original appeal at Feministing. You turn to Feministing for the hot, fresh, intersectional feminist analysis you can’t get anywhere else. And today, we’re turning to you: Become a Feministing member,…